Human beings seem vastly “over-endowed” for hunter-gatherer or agrarian existence. For tens of thousands of years humanity carried intellectual capacities that offered no discernable advantage. From a Darwinian perspective, such capacities would be unlikely to arise and, even if they had randomly emerged, they would likely have been eliminated or minimized by natural selection. From a creation perspective, however, these special capacities make sense. They serve the highly specialized needs of a technological society, benefiting the life quality and longevity of all humanity.
The dexterity of the human hand certainly gave the human race an early survival advantage. Humans could craft more elegant tools and weapons than other bipedal primate species. However, the ability to type faster than a hundred words per minute seems to have offered no particular survival advantage until the twentieth century. Likewise, the remarkable ability to play a Liszt piano concerto had no utility until the invention of the piano.
The intelligence quotient of the human brain gave the human species a huge survival advantage in that they could invent new implements for hunting, farming, cooking, building, and even governing. But, again, not until the twentieth century was any use found for the phenomenal capacity of the human brain to perform such higher mathematical functions as nonlinear tensor calculus, relativistic quantum theory, and higher dimensional geometry. These abilities come at a cost: thirty-five percent of the entire blood flow in the human body services the brain. Moreover, to make room for the brain lobes that support mathematics, logic, analysis, communication, and meditation, the lobes that support some of our senses (smell and sound in particular) and of our muscles were reduced. Thus, the human brain comes equipped for higher mathematics, analysis, and meditation beyond the demands of mere survival.
Many biologists have pointed out that when humans are compared to other mammals, they are dramatically oversexed. The human sex drive is unusually strong and is virtually continuous. Whereas the females of other mammal species are sexually receptive for only a few days out of the year, human females are ready to mate throughout the year. This tremendous capacity for sex explains how the human race was able to multiply to six billion individuals in a relatively short time period. This rapid reproduction of humanity was God’s specific goal and is explicitly laid out in Genesis 1 and 9.
Extraordinary capacity and drive for sex is particularly critical in a high-tech society. Both affluence and technology work against human reproduction by providing humans with powerful diversions.1 If it were not for exceptional sexual capacity, the human species could not survive a high-tech environment.
These three anticipatory endowments-among others-equip humanity for peak performance in a high technology environment. Humans, unlike any other species of life, appear to have been equipped in advance for a life far different from the one they experienced when they first appeared. Such equipping of humanity, while puzzling from a Darwinian view, points to a Creator with foresight and a special plan for the creatures who bear His image.
Endnotes
Nations with per capita income exceeding $20,000 all have birth rates less than the replacement rate. Interestingly, the availability of superior birth control methods does not play the most significant role in lowering the birth rate. That distinction belongs to the availability of electric lights and the degree of urbanization. Also, the age at which men and women have their first child rises in direct proportion to the level of technology that they enjoy.
